Release: 2023
Most otome that finds its way into English is of the visual novel genre. Otome itself is more of a story/demographic categorization, involving female protagonists romancing male love interests, but the gameplay itself can be a rhythm game, a visual novel, or an RPG. Some people will even include games such as Fire Emblem and Dragon Age which are not restricted to female protagonists but nonetheless have a strong romantic component to them.
That is to say, there is a reason I'm not including Ten Trials of Babel: The Doppelganger Maze in the usual VN Talk series even though it is otome. This is a puzzle adventure game and if you're not using a walkthrough, you're probably going to want a notepad near you to work out some of the puzzles. But if you want an assortment of guys to fall for your protagonist, that's all there.
Ten Trials of Babel: The Doppelganger Maze is probably the gaming mash-up of my dreams, being otome crossed with a survival game and for something as short as it is, I was pleasantly surprised by how big it went with the worldbuilding. At first I thought it was too much for a game that I knew was going to be limited in scope, but it manages to make it work for reasons that I'll get to. But first, it just launched in English last November, so be warned there are SPOILERS after the break, including the ending.
First off, I want to clear up that the ten trials in the title are clearly a reference to the ten floors of the Babel Tower that is the survival game, and not that the player is going to play through all ten trials as you might expect. The game clocks in at about 10 hours if you want to do everything, more if you make a number of mistakes and have to replay segments like I did.
I knew the playthrough time going in, but I still thought I was going to go through all ten trials, one on each floor, since it's clear that the Story World we begin the game in has multiple floors. But in actuality, each Story World takes place on a "floor" of Babel Tower and the characters, known as Story Divers, typically can choose which floor they want to enter when starting a new game. High level players can enter lower level floors to farm points that will allow them to buy equipment, skills, and other resources that might allow them to survive at a higher level one. So even though there are three floors in this particular Story World, all of it actually takes place on Babel's Floor 1.
Nameable protagonist Xixy finds herself waking up in a virtual world, told about this interdimensional survival game by a "friendly" AI, and then unceremoniously tossed into her first Story World with not only her own survival at stake, but that of humanity itself. No pressure!
(Note: The name constantly uses "race" for everything, probably because most games use race to describe other species in fantasy games like elf, orc, troll, etc, but it becomes really awkward when the translation uses "interracial" to talk about romantic relationships between different species so I'll be using species and race interchangeably.)
The Babel Cross and the sheer number of people participating in a game that is already in progress by the time Xixy joins her first Story World feels like a lot when it's just her and her three human teammates. The game throws the big picture concept at you right away, but then you spend the next several hours in a very confined setting with a small number of people, and wondering where all these mysterious races that you don't even meet over the course of the game come in. In fact, of the nine non-human races, you only meet four of them, and two of them are undead that used to be human.
It feels like a bit of a missed opportunity since many of them are non-standard fantasy races. I would have liked to know what a meka, a yao, or a relic is like. Instead we got a beast (fairly standard Asian pop culture beast person with a human face but beast ears, tail, and some extra fur here and there), a phantom, a spirit, and a ghost. And yes, there probably could have been some better naming of those last three!
The phantom is not actually undead, but an entity that possesses dead bodies and uses it as a shell for three to five years after which it needs to find another one. I feel like the translators probably should have swapped spirit and ghost though since Arlo is the spirit and relatively benign (compared to DawnWhisper) and DawnWhisper is the ghost and clearly the more malevolent of the two.
To me, a ghost is clearly human in origin and lingers in this world due to ties to its past, which is Arlo's story. A "spirit," at least in English, doesn't have to be human in origin and DawnWhisper, who is a little more vampiric in nature (supposedly having a sun weakness) and makes no mention of having a human past, fits better with this looser definition. I'm only supposing he was human at one point because he wants to turn Xixy into a fellow ghost which suggests this may be how his species propagates.
When it's just Xixy and her first few party members, they're all human and happy because that means they've all been assigned the same Story World goal and will not have to work against each other to survive the current floor of Babel. All they care about is solving the puzzles and earning the floor boss's permission to leave, which is their goal. (It's a first floor, so in theory it should be the easiest, though I certainly got myself killed multiple times when not following a walkthrough.)
In fact the first good ending of the game is just the four humans and Arlo, who chooses to join them as a summon rather than becoming a Story Diver himself because he does not want to have to compete against them someday. The group rejoices about managing to leave with a bunch of points so they can later challenge higher floors. It's a pretty upbeat ending with everyone having come together as a team. If the game didn't tell you there was a true ending (and hints at how to unlock it) it would have been a perfectly fine ending to the game.
But what elevates Ten Trials of Babel beyond its death game premise, is the true ending, which is only accessible after completing the good ending. This is where we get into the purpose of the Babel Cross and why we need the big picture worldbuilding with so many species and all the interspecies fighting that has no immediate bearing on our main cast.
This Story World is the Doppelganger Maze because it's themed around doppelgangers. If one gets a clear look at one's own reflection a doppelganger will appear. Though aggressive and irrational at first, it will gradually gain its sanity, and as it does, the original will become weaker. The game is actually pretty slick at getting multiple doppelgangers in play without overwhelming the Story World with mirrors to navigate around. Initially doppelgangers are just something to be careful of creating, but when Xixy is desperate to escape DawnWhisper, she triggers her doppelganger on purpose to create a distraction for him.
For some reason, Xixy's doppelganger is incredibly powerful. Whereas most doppelgangers are versions of how the original sees themselves or wishes they could be, Arlo, as the floor boss, tells them that her doppelganger was set by the Babel system rather than being created through his doppelganger power. Xixy's doppelganger is a future version of her (one that is so strong she can go toe to toe with the millennia old DawnWhisper). Late in the true route, Xixy's doppelganger regains enough sanity for the two to speak civilly, and this is when the game changes.
But future Xixy tells the current version of herself that she has won the game, and humanity was destroyed anyway. It wasn't anything the Babel Tower admins did, they kept their word, but humans claimed three of the seven spots (and the game doesn't go into why) and the other races ganged up to exterminate the humans for being greedy.
Worse for future Xixy on a personal level, she lost all the friends she'd made along the way, and she tells current Xixy the fate of all her companions. Since Babel would grant her a wish for reaching the top of the tower, her wish was to die and have her data turned into a doppelganger so she could meet her past self in the very first Story World she ever went to. Future Xixy wants the group to fight the system and tells them how before having current Xixy kill her (since as a doppelganger she'll keep draining the original the longer she exists).
While fighting the system is not an original twist, it's not really what I expected for a short game, and it's after this revelation that all the characters really start to work together. The Babel Cross is supposed to separate the races, but everyone works together to accomplish a perfect score to leave the Story World, whether using creative interpretations of their given goal (like Arlo needs someone to be left behind, which they decide can be Carrus's doppelganger) or helping someone else cheese it.
I wasn't certain I'd like DawnWhisper, being an overbearing and possessive egomaniac, but even when he reveals he's on Babel's payroll, it's more because he knows that if he declined, Babel would send someone else to do the job and Xixy and company know how to deal with him. This leads to a pretty rad scene where Xixy gets to use her future self's power for 3 minutes in a head-to-head fight against him and DawnWhisper's affection meter keeps going up every time she lands a hit on him (since the big thing he loves about her is her potential). Though he's insufferable at times and claims he's only around for Xixy, he's still a member of the team.
The game ends with the group accessing the Tower Tilter permission, which exists within Babel since (surprise!) the entities running Babel are not a monolithic group and there's a person or a faction working against them that has given them a path to the Inverse Babel Tower that can send the whole thing crashing down.
It felt like a solid end that I would be happy with even if no sequel ever comes.
And the epilogue is where the fluffier parts of the romance come in. Though there are flirty and occasionally suggestive scenes in the middle of the story (with Victor being quite obvious about his desire to become Xixy's trophy boyfriend), and Xixy needs at minimum friendship with Saint, Victor, and Kruger to access the good ending, the scenes where it can be construed that she has entered a relationship with one of the men only happen in the epilogue after the true ending.
Since it's possible to raise the affection meters of all six guys in a single run (and the dialogue gets hilarious on the true route when it becomes apparent all six are romantically interested in her), I think it's worth doing so you can just access all the character endings at once from a single save. The character endings are pretty good, and even redeemed DawnWhisper for me. (I did find him entertaining as a character, but it wasn't until the epilogue that I thought anything positive about him as a romantic interest.) It also takes the edge off any of the numerous bad endings as they tend to portray the very various guys in the least flattering light you can give them.
The only thing that drags the game down is the translation. While it's usually good, using natural grammar and the humor translates well enough I was laughing several times during the game, it has a problem with choosing the right word.
For instance, it uses "host" instead of "original" when referring to the original person a doppelganger copies. "Senior" is used to refer to the veteran StoryDivers, when in English we would probably use "veteran" or "mentor" depending on the context. Sometimes there are similarly spelled words that are used instead of the appropriate one ("bondage" for "bandage"). Also, I'm pretty sure that the mechanical race of creatures called Meka should have been called Mecha in English, which would make their mechanical nature obvious to English speakers.
This is a game done by a small studio and most of the time the point gets across without being too distracting, so I wouldn't say to avoid it because of the translation quality (I've seen a lot worse), but it would have been nice if it was clearer. The publisher put up a notice on their Steam pages that they are open to suggestions for fixing the text, so hopefully there will be a patch to clean things up at a later date.
But even if there isn't, I really enjoyed this game and $3 for a fully voice acted puzzle adventure game with a dash of romance is a pretty good deal.
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